


Seasons

by Writerleft



Series: Comes Marching Home [84]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Day 5: Seasons, F/F, Korrasami - Freeform, Korrasami Month 2019, Letter, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-13 11:07:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18939697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Writerleft/pseuds/Writerleft
Summary: Winter, Spring, Summer, and FallWinter, Spring, Summer, and FallFour Seasons, Four LovesFour Seasons, For Love.





	Seasons

Asami. My wife. My love.

Your names, these words, still excite me. Let me start by making that clear. In a life of varied and debatable decisions, marrying you has definitely been my greatest. Of course, with how I felt about you, it was hardly a decision at all.

But I get ahead of myself. Good morning. I hope you slept well. I’m sure I’m around, but I woke up early and I had Thoughts, and you know how that can be.

Wife. Beloved. Asami.

It struck me how these words, these thoughts, don’t mean the same to me as they once did.

Don’t get me wrong—they still warm my soul and make every moment of every day worthwhile! But… the same way that I’ve naturally started eating more sheep-rabbit food than I used to, my love for you has changed as well.

There’s an old folk ballad from the Fire Nation, about four seasons, and four loves. When I was younger, I thought it represented different people the singer loved throughout a year—I was pretty literal-minded back then, if you remember! Maybe, too, it’s because I was so young… for a teenager, one year of time can feel like an eternity. After all, Mako and I only dated for two seasons, and at the time, it felt almost as important as the civil war.

In case you had not noticed, though, I am older now. We’ve been married for twenty-six years, and known each other for thirty three or so. After all that time, I’ve learned to see that song in new ways, time in new ways. You in new ways.

Tenzin and I spoke about the song once, about his father’s interpretation of it. Aang, apparently, was quite fond of it. Four seasons. Four elements. Four nations. All loved, equally, all with their own place and time. To him, it was not a wistful song about serial dating, but about the Avatar cycle itself.

I see some wisdom in that—though I don’t imagine the song was written for the Avatar specifically. Aang, gotta love him, but he could get a bit single-minded on certain philosophical points. But perhaps his was the season for that, in a way that my time and place have not been.

Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. What do those mean to me?

‘Winter’ as a concept may not hold the existential dread for you as it does for a Water Tribe person. Winter, in the south, would descend in all it’s darkness and crush us for months on end. My winter was likewise a dark time, a lonely time. A time where I knew love, but was distant from its warmth. A time where I struggled to grow, struggled to live, struggled to hope, struggled even to survive.

But one day… the seasons turned, and light broke over the horizon, and there you were as radiant as the first Spring sunrise with a new haircut and a tight embrace. My bones thawed, my spirit blossomed, and though a few spring rains darkened some of our days, we grew, and we did it together. My love for you changed from a distant, desperate yearning thing that got me through the darkness, into a passionate, vibrant display. A cacophony of color, like a field of wildflowers so soft and sweet that somehow, the all-too-recent sting of barren winter began to fade.

In its own time, Summer came. Not all at once, of course, but little by little, the explosions of blossoms and new life settled. Flowers fell from the trees, but branches reached higher and roots spread further, and our separate lives became our life together. Summer brought us that stability to truly prosper, to drop new seeds of our own. And while Summer has not been free of its own hard times, it’s heat waves and its typhoons, all in all, my love, the Spirits must have favored us, for our Summer has been as long and joyful as any could have hoped.

And now, as our children are starting families of their own, and we reap the harvest of all we’ve done together during these long, happy Summer years. As gradually as it began, our Summer is flowing gradually into Fall, and I find my love for you has changed once again. Ripened. The leaves begin to turn, a cool breeze rustling through them, as we prepare to leave the world we’ve built to those we’ve built it for—but our time is not yet done. Perhaps we don’t have the passion of Spring or the stamina of Summer, but those things were not lost—they were traded. Traded for the comfort of family, the wisdom of experience, for the miles and miles of footprints behind us and every single memory that goes with them.

Four seasons, Sparks. Four loves, Asami. Never one day has my love for you lessened, but we know now, without thinking, that we can weather any storm. You’ve been my sunrise, my blue sky, the fire in my hearth, and I no longer have to merely hope that I’ve been the same for you.

After all these seasons, you can take all these things I’ve said in words and tell them to me with nothing but a quiet smile. No matter what season we’ve been in, that smile alone is always enough to make me fall for you all over again—and it always will be.


End file.
